by J Sri Raman
(Daily Times, November 23, 2006)
Any thought of an ideological division in the BJP and the ‘parivar’ is a dangerous delusion, but many peace-loving Indians will find the prospect of a Modi-led BJP more than mildly disturbing
Two major Indian States have started gearing up for elections due in 2007. The polls will also represent a power tussle internal to one of the parties, and the result of that may prove even more important for India and, by extension, for the subcontinent.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will be making a bid for power in both Uttar Pradesh (UP) and Gujarat. The party’s electoral fortunes may also decide Lal Krishna Advani’s successor — UP’s Rajnath Singh or Gujarat’s Narendra Modi — as the political flag-bearer of the far-right ‘parivar’ (‘family’). It might be naïve to perceive this internal struggle in ideological terms, but it does involve the question of tactics for a party that has shown some confusion over its options since it was voted out two years ago in the national elections.
Scheduled to elect the State assembly next February, the poll fever is already beginning to rise in UP. Surprisingly, however, even Gujarat is showing signs of a pre-poll atmosphere even though elections to its assembly are due only next December. One never knows with Modi, the opposition (outside and inside the State’s ruling BJP) seems to be saying. The chief minister had, after all, succeeded in getting the last assembly elections advanced by over a year to reap the rich harvest of the Hindu vote after the anti-Muslim pogrom of early 2002.
The importance of UP for all parties with national-level ambitions is obvious. Placed at the center of India’s Hindi-speaking heartland, the State continues to return the largest contingent of members to the Lok Sabha (the Lower House Parliament) and has produced most of the country’s prime ministers. Gujarat does not qualify in terms of size and population but has become special politically because of its ‘parivar’-conferred status as a ‘laboratory of Hindutva’. This gives it, once known better for its business-mindedeness, even greater political importance than the bigger UP.
Ditto for the difference in importance between the individual BJP luminaries involved in the upcoming elections: Rajnath Singh is the supposed successor to Advani as the BJP president. He is, however, looked upon mainly as a UP-based leader and merely a stopgap successor to the founder of the ‘Ayodhya andolan (movement)’, who floundered in Pakistan by saying good things about the Quaid-e-Azam. Modi, on the other hand, though only the chief minister of a State, has been a nationally recognised face of fascism for over four years. And he is pitching as an aspirant for the position of Advani’s real successor in the party.
Singh and Modi symbolise the two ideological-political options before the party. In popular political parlance, the choice is between ‘Mandal’ and ‘kamandal’. ‘Mandal’ refers to caste politics. The word is eponymous with the report of the Justice B P Mandal Commission of 1980, which recommended reservations in government jobs for lower castes, especially those called Other Backward Classes (OBC). ‘Mandal’ became an explosive issue in 1990 when former Prime Minister V P Singh ordered implementation of the recommendations.
The BJP was in the vanguard of the virulently anti-Mandal agitation that broke out then. The party did no stop there. Consciously and cunningly, it resorted to the tactic of ‘kamandal’ to counter ‘Mandal’. ‘Kamandal’, denoting a wandering Hindu mendicant’s bowl, came to symbolise a religious-communal riposte to the caste-appeal politics of parties such as the Rashtriya Janata Dal of the redoubtable Lalu Prasad Yadav of Bihar and Samajwadi Party of current UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav.
The BJP’s ‘kamandal’ phase culminated in the Ayodhya movement and the Babri Masjid demolition of 1992. Advani’s admirers and apologists have never tired of pointing out that the tactic transformed the BJP from a two-seat party in the Lok Sabha to a serious contender for power at the Centre.
Proximity to power and compulsions of politics, however, forced the BJP to put ‘kamandal’ on ‘the back burner’, to use the party’s own phrase, and even combine it with ‘Mandal’. Rajnath Singh fought Mulayam Singh in UP by adopting the platform of ‘Most Backward Classes (MBC)’ which served to divide the pristine OBC constituency.
‘Mandal’ and ‘kamandal’ do not always mix. They did not, for example, in the last assembly elections in Bihar, Lalu Prasad’s State, when the local BJP unit pointedly kept Modi out of the campaigning. It is quite likely that the party’s UP unit, fighting these polls under Rajnsth Singh and OBC leader Kalyan Singh (who was chief minister when the Babri mosque was pulled down and who later blamed it on Advani and his band), will also avoid association with Modi.
After the BJP’s advent to power at the Centre, the party has witnessed three major attempts at ‘going back to the roots’ or returning to rabid communalism. Modi was associated with two of them. The first attempt was made in the flush of the massacre of 2002, when the party seriously threatened to ‘repeat Gujarat’ in other States awaiting elections. The second attempt came, when the rest of the ‘parivar’ recommended a ‘return to the roots’ as the right response to the ‘damage’ caused by Advani’s observations on Pakistan’s soil.
The third and the most sinister attempt in the series came in the wake of the Mumbai blasts of July 11. Modi rushed to the capital of Maharashtra as if to continue his post-pogrom Gujarat campaign against a minority targeted as a community of terrorists. In the process, he also revived his offensive against the India-Pakistan peace process, regaling his audiences with the recurring refrain of ‘Mian Musharraf’. Sources close to Modi have left little doubt that his Mumbai foray was meant to mark the beginning of a not-so-long march to the BJP’s helm.
If the BJP returns to power in UP, it will be seen in the party and the ‘parivar’ as a definitive step towards a comeback in New Delhi. Consequently, it will consolidate Rajnath Singh’s position to some extent. If the BJP loses in UP but retains power in Gujarat, many in the ‘parivar’ will see that as granting Modi a national-level mandate.
Any thought of an ideological division in the BJP and the ‘parivar’ is a dangerous delusion, but many peace-loving Indians will find the prospect of a Modi-led BJP more than mildly disturbing.
The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled ‘At Gunpoint’
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